My partner is an academic in a humanities department at a top UK uni, and I work in STEM in the private sector. Universities in the UK are a mess, everything i

My partner is an academic in a humanities department at a top UK uni, and I work in STEM in the private sector. Universities in the UK are a mess, everything is rated on the salary within a couple of years of those leaving uni. But few people are asking if people are happy once they leave Uni, if they want to chase money, if the abundance of Uni places and associated debt make sense to everyone, and even whether society is better for so many people going to Uni. In the UK we've obliterated all vocational and manufacturing polytechnics, replacing them with STEM and business focused universities. From my perspective, the pendulum has swung too far in this direction (towards everything being quantified with money and money and employment being the sole value of a uni and the courses it offers) and it needs to start swinging back the other direction. A very simple phrase I recently heard and am paraphrasing: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail? Most of STEM can be quantified, it's a lot harder to quantify the value of the Humanities and Social Sciences... maybe we should stop trying to make that the primary way to measure it. Universities (in the UK at least) seem to be suffering from the metric becoming the measure.